12 March 2012

Lauren Myracle.

Biggest surprise for me? That more people aren't describing Shine as a crime/mystery novel. Because, yes, it's a nuanced portrait of a small Southern town—the beautiful, the downright ugly, and the in-between—filled with three-dimensional characters, and it's a story about friendship, family, fear, and forgiveness**, but the driving force behind all of the action is a question: What Really Happened at the Come 'n' Go That Night?

Very soon, Bliss will be going to school for the first time. She will be attending Crestview Academy, the most prestigious, the most elite private school in the South, and she will be a freshman. It sounds like the perfect set-up for a fish-out-of-water-coming-of-age historical fiction novel, right? Yeah, well, I'm not done: Bliss is a ghost story. A creepy, tense, thrilling, hair-raising, goosebump-inducing, yicky and sometimes downright twisted ghost story.